My first road trip

This is an account of a family trip to northern California to visit my oldest brother and his family in Sacramento. It is the first road trip I remember taking. We left late Thursday, December 26, 1957, and returned home late Thursday, January 2, 1958. Although I distinctly remember the trip, I am indebted to my mother’s diary for some of the specific details.

I have always loved to travel. Especially if it involves a road trip. Few things are more thrilling than the prospect of the open road stretching out there before me.

My earliest memory of a vacation, other than visits to relatives somewhere in northern Utah or eastern Idaho, was a car trip to California during the holidays when I was eight years old. I guess this was technically a trip to visit relatives because we drove to Sacramento to visit my oldest brother Lyle, who was in the Air Force, and his wife Barbara and their two sons. Stanley was three years old. And Terry was about twenty months old. I did not remember that Barbara was so very pregnant, but a little more than three weeks after our visit she gave birth to their third son, David.

But the trip counts in my book as a bona fide vacation because it was to a part of the country we had never been to before.

We left in the middle of the night the day after Christmas. My parents and the five youngest children (thirteen-year-old Gene, twelve-year-old Ray, eight-year-old me, five-year-old Dale, and fourteen-month-old Jackie) made the trip. Jerry and Kay stayed home to tend the farm, milk the cows, and who knows what else.

We drove though the night down through eastern Oregon into Nevada. Ray, Dale, Jackie, and I were bedded down in the back seat. Mom wrote in her diary that she drove from Lovelock to Reno and noted that the roads were good all the way except a few icy spots at McDermitt, a tiny little town on the Nevada–Oregon border.

In Reno, where we probably did breakfast, I remember a sign arching across the street proclaim­ing Reno as “The Biggest Little City in the World.” We continued from there up and through the Sierra Nevada Mountains, over Donner Pass, and down the other side toward Sacramento. There was a lot of snow, a lot more than I was ever used to seeing.

As we approached Sacramento we were on a freeway, the first time I had ever actually seen one, and I thought it was pretty awesome. I found the freeway exits a novel bit of ingenuity and can even remember to this day, fifty years later, that we took the Watt Avenue exit off the freeway to find Lyle and Barbara’s place somewhere near McClellan Air Force Base.

We arrived at Lyle and Barbara’s place midmorning on Friday, December 27, and pretty much just chilled out for the rest of that day. Lyle was out on a flight when we arrived and came home a few hours later. If my memory serves correctly, it seems it was always grey while we were there, either grey and foggy or grey and overcast, but a lot of grey.

Over the next few days we visited various sites around the Sacramento area. One day we went to the zoo and saw all kinds of animals and birds. I probably had never been to a zoo before. Another day we visited the state capitol. Another day we went out into the surrounding countryside and saw orange, lemon, and grapefruit trees just loaded with fruit. And I think we actually saw the sun that day. We went to a dam and saw a prison and stopped by the air force base and watched jets take off. These were all marvels to an eight-year-old boy.

On the last day of 1957 we drove to San Francisco. My mom’s diary account detailed the events of the day (with her spellings and punctuation a bit standardized):

“We headed for San Francisco on highway 40 through Vallejo, San Pablo, El Cerrito, Albany, Berkley, and down by Alameda and the outskirts of Oakland then back across the Bay Bridge (toll for 25¢), 8 miles long, to San Francisco, and drove up Nob Hill and went to the naval maritime museum then parked on the bay and saw some big ships come in and leave and saw Alcatraz, then we drove along the docks and Fisherman’s Wharf, through Chinatown, past the Keizer Stadi­um, saw the mint, rode through residential area and business district, then we to Golden Gate Park and went through the Steinhart Aquari­um, then we went down and parked on the Ocean and watched the tide and the kids got some seashells and put their hand in the Ocean, then about dark we went across the Golden Gate Bridge, 25¢ toll, and went up high­way 101 to San Rafael and had a ham­burger and milkshake and fries and do­nuts at a drive inn, then we got lost and went to San Anselmo and Fair­fax then came back to San Rafael and down around San Quentin and across the new Richmond Bridge (75¢ toll) and back up highway 40 home.” That one long sentence was indicative of what the long, busy day was like.

That New Year’s Eve was my first sight of the Pacific Ocean. I had never seen an ocean before, and I remember playing along the cold, damp, gray beach, and sticking my hand into the cold water and chasing the waves and looking for sand dollars and seashells. It was a glorious outing.

We ushered in 1958 by spending New Year’s Day resting up from the previous day’s adventures and watching the Rose Parade and bowl games and eating and visiting and playing games.


The next morning we piled back into our car, our 1957 red and white Dodge, and headed for home. Mom mentioned in her diary that we stopped and bought a bag of oranges and 12 pounds of bananas for just a dollar. We left Lyle and Barbara’s place just a little before 10:00 in the morning (Pacific time zone) and got back to our house in eastern Oregon about 10:30 that night (Mountain time zone).

There was a lot more snow going home. As we started up toward Donner Pass, we had to stop to put chains on the car, although in the end we didn’t really need them. As my predominant memory of Sacramento and San Francisco was grey, my memory of the ride home was white from all the snow on the ground and in the air.

It had been a fun, vision-expanding trip for an eight-year-old farm boy. I had seen and experienced all kinds of things previously beyond what I knew about my limited corner of the world. And it undoubtedly fueled my later desires to explore the big broad world out there at the end of some road.